Thirteen years after his early death, Leo Mattioli’s legacy continues in popular dances and celebrations where his songs, under the contagious rhythm of Santa Fe cumbia, are inexorable to the passage of time.
Known as the “Santa Fe lion”, from his native Santa Fe, he managed to become a leading singer and composer of the romantic genre in the country. He died early on August 7, 2011 as a result of heart failure, after a night tour that included three consecutive shows, the last one with an abrupt end and afflicted by some symptoms such as shortness of breath and chest pain.
He was only 38 years old and was already an established musician when death found him in a hotel in Necochea. His solo career had lasted just over 10 years and had originated from a tragedy: after surviving a fatal traffic accident on January 15, 2000 in which musicians Sergio Reyes and Darío Begeni, two of his companions in the Trinidad Group, with which he had until then garnered popular recognition since 1992, lost their lives.
During his recovery, he left the group and began working on the songs for “Un homenaje al cielo”, his first solo album, dedicated to his friends and with which he would record one of his greatest hits, “despues de ti”, while he tried to overcome the pain of the loss and the chronic after-effects on his hip, which were beginning to overwhelm him and condemn him to a dangerous relationship with morphine and cigarettes for a good part of the rest of his life.
Since then, the conqueror of repeated gold and platinum records has been in the news both for his countless hits and for his several hospitalizations for heart and respiratory problems; as in 2009, when he had to be treated in intensive care due to a severe case of pneumonia that left him in a pharmacological coma.
The benchmark of romantic cumbia, who was born on August 13, 1972 in the city of Santo Tomé with the name of Leonardo Guillermo Mattioli, wrote his own legend during his lifetime, with an extensive discography of 23 albums, 7 of them with Trinidad and 16 as a soloist, and as the author of classics such as “Llorarás más de mil tiempos por amor”, “Yo no soy Dios” and “Si te garran las ganas”.
In a relationship with his wife since he was 18 and father of six children, he knew how to create a personal brand within the tropical genre, based on narratives of sexual adventures and fleeting romances, in the tradition of Santa Fe cumbia and the legacy of some of his idols such as Sandro, Roberto Carlos and Cacho Castaña (with whom he recorded “Tramposa y Mentirosa”).
“I am always asked what my success is. I think it must be because I write about what happens to me, or about things that are very close and very strong. Stories that have happened to me, many of them about love, eroticism and many things like that, and people also go through the same things that happen to me,” she once confessed to Susana Giménez.
The news of his sudden death shocked both insiders and outsiders within the scene and would make the headlines of newspapers; a fact that would end up turning the “Santa Fe lion” into one of the most celebrated legends of cumbia.
